Bryan Cassiday – Alien Assault Review

A fine collection of sci-fi, aliens, time travel and my favorite the apocalypse are all waiting you here in Alien Assault. The collection is kicked off with IceCube Zero a research facility at the bottom of the earth, the cold and unforgiving Antarctica. The small team is to study elements collected from another solar system to learn more about our own, but little do they know a virus has hitched a ride. This is a tension filled story as the researcher’s slowly lose grips with what is real and imagined and no good can come from being isolated with an unknown alien virus. In The Tracker we learn the virus has continued to cause chaos and with it the end of the world and taking a man’s dog has consequences. Harmon just wants his dog back and will do anything to find it and when he does he learns a horrible truth and no amount of zombies will stop him. There are a few common threads that weave through each story in Alien Assault, aliens of course, the fact we can’t see them and a few more that connect these shorts. This is a fun and entertaining read, Bryan Cassiday spins very good stories again and again as he did in his book Comes a Chopper. There are a wide variety of stories in Alien Assault, a man living a single day over and over again wishing for a different outcome, a women who is on the run and not for the reason she thinks and an assassin sent to Mars to deal with a planet that wants to succeed from the union is thrown quite a loop when he arrives home to earth. The resurrection of Phil Lambeer is a great mind twist of a short story and I was taken by surprise by the ending of this story. A Hatchet for Jack Molloy is an action packed story of the zombie apocalypse and while zombie stories are everywhere this one stands on its own. Jack and Connor are trying to escape the horde and suffer bites that take this tale in a direction that makes it unique from most zombie stories. In the end what are you willing to do to survive and will it be the right choice. I found almost every story very enjoyable and the stories moves with a good pace and have an endings that are quite a surprise.

Rating 4/5

Book Info

Length: 198 Pages

Release date: November 19, 2014

Mind-blowing science-fiction tales that will scare you to your very core. Included are stories about alien invasions, time travel, zombie apocalypses, and more. The human race is always under assault in these stories, and somehow we must survive.

An Antarctic ice station comes under attack by a virus from outer space during a subzero blizzard . . . Venusians subject an earthling to the torture of having to live over and over again his murder trial for the killing of his friend . . . An exorcist suspects a child is possessed, but who is doing it and why? Is it a demon or something even more terrifying? . . . A Special Forces soldier with a death wish can’t figure out why the government has saved him from his spaceship’s crash-landing. When he does, it’s too late.

These are but a few of Bryan Cassiday’s apocalyptic stories that take you beyond the realm of reality into the undiscovered country of the horror of the imagination and its territory that knows no bounds. Destination fear.

Bryan Cassiday, biography

Bryan Cassiday is the author of ten novels. His numerous short stories have appeared in anthologies, such as HORROR SOCIETY STORIES VOLUME ONE. He has been compared to writers as diverse as Robert Ludlum, Jorge Luis Borges, and Max Brooks.

ALIEN ASSAULT, COMES A CHOPPER, HELTER SKELTER, and BLOOD MOON: THRILLERS AND TALES OF TERROR are his collections of apocalyptic horror short stories. His horror story “A Way Out” is being translated into French for the May/June 2015 issue of the horror anthology TENEBRES.

He also wrote the CIA spy thrillers THE ANACONDA COMPLEX, THE KILL OPTION, and FETE OF DEATH.